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Monday, December 5, 2016

James McAdams on Melville's Bohemians

I'm only catching up to this excellent, enlightening article by James McAdams in Connotations 25.1 on Melville's Pierre and the "Church of the Bohemians." The city sections of Pierre project, as stated in the Abstract, "a nascent cultural movement fully
developed by the 1860s in the figures of Walt Whitman and the patrons of
Pfaff's Saloon." At Melville's "Church of the Apostles," Pierre himself emerges

as
an American Bohemian, a starving artist writing his "comprehensive
compacted work" in the garret of an abandoned church whose other tenants
offers a varied portrait of a nascent, and previously unexplored,
American Bohemia. --James McAdams